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The Romanization of Bengali, or the representation of the Bengali language
Bengali language

Bengali or Bangla is an Indo-European languages language of the eastern Indian subcontinent, evolved from the Magadhi Prakrit and Sanskrit languages....
 in the Latin script. While different standards for romanization
Romanization

In linguistics, romanization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Latin alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system ....
 have been proposed for Bengali, these have not been adopted with the degree of uniformity seen in languages such as Japanese
Japanese language

IPA: [n?iho?go] is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is related to the Ryukyuan languages....
 or Sanskrit. Most standardized Bengali romanizations are adapted from standards proposed for Indic languages, and these models are compared below.

Transliteration vs Transcription
The Romanization of a language written in a non-Roman script can be based on transliteration
Transliteration

Transliteration is the practice of transcribing a word or text written in one writing system into another writing system or system of rules for such practice....
 (orthographically
Orthography

The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Orthography is derived from Greek language ????? orth?s and ???fe?? gr?phein ....
 accurate, i.e.






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The Romanization of Bengali, or the representation of the Bengali language
Bengali language

Bengali or Bangla is an Indo-European languages language of the eastern Indian subcontinent, evolved from the Magadhi Prakrit and Sanskrit languages....
 in the Latin script. While different standards for romanization
Romanization

In linguistics, romanization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Latin alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system ....
 have been proposed for Bengali, these have not been adopted with the degree of uniformity seen in languages such as Japanese
Japanese language

IPA: [n?iho?go] is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is related to the Ryukyuan languages....
 or Sanskrit. Most standardized Bengali romanizations are adapted from standards proposed for Indic languages, and these models are compared below.

Transliteration vs Transcription


The Romanization of a language written in a non-Roman script can be based on transliteration
Transliteration

Transliteration is the practice of transcribing a word or text written in one writing system into another writing system or system of rules for such practice....
 (orthographically
Orthography

The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Orthography is derived from Greek language ????? orth?s and ???fe?? gr?phein ....
 accurate, i.e. the original spelling can be recovered) or transcription
Transcription (linguistics)

Transcription is the conversion into written, typewritten or printed form, of a spoken language source, such as the proceedings of a court hearing....
 (phonetically accurate, i.e. the pronunciation can be reproduced). This distinction is important in Bengali as its orthography was adopted from Sanskrit, and ignores sound change
Sound change

Sound change includes any processes of language change that affect pronunciation or sound system structures . Sound change can consist of the replacement of one phoneme by another, the complete loss of the affected sound, or even the introduction of a new sound in a place where there previously was none....
 processes of several millennia. To some degree, all writing systems differ from the way the language is pronounced, but this may be more extreme for languages like Bengali. For example, the three letters ?, ?, and ? had distinct pronunciations in Sanskrit, but over several centuries, the standard pronunciation of Bengali (usually modeled on the Nadia
Nadia

Nadia may refer to:...
 dialect), has lost these phonetic distinctions (all three are usually pronounced as IPA ) while the spelling distinction nevertheless persists in orthography.

In written texts, it is easy to distinguish between homophones such as ??? shap "curse" from ??? shap "snake". Such a distinction could be particularly relevant in searching for the term in an encyclopedia, for example. However, the fact that the words sound identical means that they would be transcribed identically; thus, some important meaning distinctions cannot be rendered in a transcription model. Another issue with transcription systems is that cross-dialectal and cross-register
Register (linguistics)

In linguistics, a register is a subset of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting. For example, an English language speaker may adhere more closely to prescription and description, pronounce words ending in -ing with a velar nasal and refrain from using the word "ain't" when speaking in a formal setting, bu...
 differences are widespread, and thus the same word or lexeme
Lexeme

A lexeme is an abstract Unit of Morphology Semantic analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word....
 may have many different transcriptions. Even simple words like ?? "mind" may be pronounced "mon", "môn", or (in poetry) "mônô" (e.g. the Indian national anthem, Jana Gana Mana
Jana Gana Mana

Jana Gana Mana is the national anthem of India. Written in highly Sanskritized Bengali language, it is the first of five stanzas of a Brahmo hymn composed and scored by Nobel Prize in Literature Rabindranath Tagore....
).

Often, different phonemes (meaningful sound differences) are represented by the same symbol or grapheme
Grapheme

In typography, a grapheme is the fundamental unit in writing systems. Graphemes include letter , Chinese characters, numerals, punctuation marks, and all the individual symbols of any of the world's writing systems....
. Thus, the vowel ? can represent both [e] (?? elo [elo] "came"), or (?? êk "one"). Occasionally, words written in the same way (homograph
Homograph

A homograph is one of a group of words that share the same spelling but have different meanings. When spoken, the meanings are sometimes, but not necessarily, distinguished by different pronunciations....
s) may have different pronunciations for differing meanings: ?? can mean "opinion" (pronounced môt), or "similar to" (môto). Thus, some important phonemic distinctions cannot be rendered in a transliteration model. In addition, when representing a Bengali word to allow speakers of other languages to pronounce it easily, it may be better to use a transcription, which does not include the silent letters and other idiosyncrasies (e.g. ????????? shastho, spelled , or ?????? ôggên, spelled ) that make Bengali orthography so complicated.

Comparison of Romanizations


Comparisons of standard romanization schemes for Bengali are given in the table below. Two standards are commonly used for transliteration of Indic languages including Bengali. Many standards (e.g. NLK / ISO), use diacritic marks and permit case markings for proper nouns. Newer forms (e.g. Harvard-Kyoto) are more suited for ASCII
ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange , is a coding standard that can be used for interchanging information, if the information is expressed mainly by the written form of English words....
-derivative keyboards, and use upper- and lower-case letters contrastively and forgo normal standards for English capitalization.

  • "NLK" stands for the diacritic-based letter-to-letter transliteration schemes, best represented by the National Library at Kolkata romanization
    National Library at Kolkata romanization

    The National Library of India romanization is the most widely used transliteration scheme in dictionaries and grammars of Indic languages. This transliteration scheme is also known as Library of Congress and is nearly identical to one of the possible ISO 15919 variants.The tables below mostly use Devanagari but include letters from Kannad...
     or the ISO 15919
    ISO 15919

    ISO 15919 Transliteration of Devanagari and related Brahmic family of scripts into Latin characters is an international standard for the transliteration of Indic scripts to the Latin alphabet formed in 2001....
    , or IAST
    IAST

    The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration is a popular transliteration scheme that allows a lossless romanization of Brahmic family....
    . This is the ISO standard, and it uses diacritic marks (e.g. a, ) to reflect the additional characters and sounds of Bengali letters.


  • ITRANS
    ITRANS

    The "Indian languages TRANSliteration" is an ASCII transliteration scheme for Brahmic family, particularly, but not exclusively, for Devanagari ....
     is an ASCII
    ASCII

    American Standard Code for Information Interchange , is a coding standard that can be used for interchanging information, if the information is expressed mainly by the written form of English words....
     representation for Sanskrit; it is one-to-many, i.e. there may be more than one way of transliterating characters, which can make internet searching more complicated. ITRANS representations forgo capitalization norms of English so as to be able to represent the characters using a normal ASCII keyboard.


  • "HK" stands for two other case-sensitive letter-to-letter transliteration schemes: Harvard-Kyoto
    Harvard-Kyoto

    The Harvard-Kyoto Convention is a system for transliteration in ASCII the Sanskrit language and other languages that use the Devanagari script. It is predominantly used informally in e-mail, and for electronic texts....
     and scheme. These are similar to the ITRANS scheme, and use only one form for each character.


  • XHK or Extended Harvard-Kyoto () stands for the case-sensitive letter-to-letter Extended Harvard-Kyoto
    Harvard-Kyoto

    The Harvard-Kyoto Convention is a system for transliteration in ASCII the Sanskrit language and other languages that use the Devanagari script. It is predominantly used informally in e-mail, and for electronic texts....
     transliteration. This adds some specific characters for handling Bengali text to IAST.


  • "Wiki" stands for a phonemic
    Phonemic orthography

    A phonemic orthography is a writing system where the written graphemes correspond to phonemes, the spoken sounds of the language. These are sometimes termed true alphabets, but non-alphabetic writing systems like syllabary can be phonemic as well....
     transcription-based romanization. It is a sound-preserving transcription based on what is perceived to be the standard pronunciation of the Bengali words, with no reference to how it is written in Bengali script. It uses diacritics often used by linguists specializing in Bengali (other than IPA
    International Phonetic Alphabet

    The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic....
    ), and is the transcription system used to represent Bengali sounds in Wikipedia
    Wikipedia

    Wikipedia is a Free content, multilingualism encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit organization Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki and encyclopedia....
     articles.


Examples

The following table includes examples of Bengali words Romanized using the various systems mentioned above.

Example words
In orthography Meaning NLK
National Library at Kolkata romanization

The National Library of India romanization is the most widely used transliteration scheme in dictionaries and grammars of Indic languages. This transliteration scheme is also known as Library of Congress and is nearly identical to one of the possible ISO 15919 variants.The tables below mostly use Devanagari but include letters from Kannad...
 		 ITRANS
ITRANS

The "Indian languages TRANSliteration" is an ASCII transliteration scheme for Brahmic family, particularly, but not exclusively, for Devanagari ....
 		 HK
Harvard-Kyoto

The Harvard-Kyoto Convention is a system for transliteration in ASCII the Sanskrit language and other languages that use the Devanagari script. It is predominantly used informally in e-mail, and for electronic texts....
 		 Wiki IPA
??mind mana mana mana mana mon [mon]
???snake sapa sApa saapa sApa shap
???curse sapa zApa shaapa zApa shap
??opinion mata mata mata mata môt
??like mata mata mata mata môto
???oil tela tela tela tela tel
???went gela gela gela gela gêlo
????fever jvara jvara jvara jvara jôr
?????????health svasthya svAsthya svaasthya svAsthya shastho
????????Bangladesh bAMlAdeza baa.mlaadesha bAMlAdeza bangladesh
????????????consonant byañjanadhvani byaJjanadhvani bya~njanadhvani byaJjanadhvani bênjondhoni
?????????suicide atmahatya AtmahatyA aatmahatyaa AtmahatyA attõhotta


Romanization Reference


The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcription is provided in the rightmost column, representing the most common pronunciation of the glyph in Standard Colloquial Bengali, alongside the various romanizations described above.

|
Consonants
Symbol NLK
National Library at Kolkata romanization

The National Library of India romanization is the most widely used transliteration scheme in dictionaries and grammars of Indic languages. This transliteration scheme is also known as Library of Congress and is nearly identical to one of the possible ISO 15919 variants.The tables below mostly use Devanagari but include letters from Kannad...
 		 ITRANS
ITRANS

The "Indian languages TRANSliteration" is an ASCII transliteration scheme for Brahmic family, particularly, but not exclusively, for Devanagari ....
 		 HK
Harvard-Kyoto

The Harvard-Kyoto Convention is a system for transliteration in ASCII the Sanskrit language and other languages that use the Devanagari script. It is predominantly used informally in e-mail, and for electronic texts....
 		 Wiki IPA
? k k k k k [k]
? kh kh kh kh kh
? g g g g g [g]
? gh gh gh gh gh
? ~N G ng [?]
? c c ch c ch
? ch ch Ch ch chh
? j j j j j
? jh jh jh jh jh
? ñ ñ ~n J n [n]
? T T t
? Th Th th
? D D d
?? .D P r
? Dh Dh dh
?? .Dh Ph r
? N N n [n]
? t t t t t
? th th th th th
? d d d d d
? dh dh dh dh dh
? n n n n n [n]
? p p p p p [p]
? ph ph ph ph f [f]
? b b b b b [b]
? bh bh bh bh bh
? m m m m m [m]
? y y y j
?? y Y Y e/- [e]/-
? r r r r r
? l l l l l [l]
? s s sh z sh/s
? Sh S sh
? s s s s sh/s
? h h h h h
|
Miscellaneous
Symbol NLK
National Library at Kolkata romanization

The National Library of India romanization is the most widely used transliteration scheme in dictionaries and grammars of Indic languages. This transliteration scheme is also known as Library of Congress and is nearly identical to one of the possible ISO 15919 variants.The tables below mostly use Devanagari but include letters from Kannad...
 		 ITRANS
ITRANS

The "Indian languages TRANSliteration" is an ASCII transliteration scheme for Brahmic family, particularly, but not exclusively, for Devanagari ....
 		 HK
Harvard-Kyoto

The Harvard-Kyoto Convention is a system for transliteration in ASCII the Sanskrit language and other languages that use the Devanagari script. It is predominantly used informally in e-mail, and for electronic texts....
 		 Wiki IPA
H H varies varies
.m M ng [?]
.N ~ ~ [~]
y y y y varies varies
v v v v varies varies
??? x kS kkh/kh
??? jñ jñ GY Jj gg/g [g?]/[g]
??? sr sr shr zr sr


|}

See also


External links